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I agree with much of what you say, but my point was just what you value on a personal level does also change as you age, it's not just a generational thing.

People still get engaged but a lot of people prefer to co-habit with a partner instead of getting married until they get much older when a societal pressure forces them into the mind-set of getting married.

I agree with the cohabiting point but it's not societal pressure forcing them into the mind-set of getting marriage. I lived with my girlfriend for four years before getting marriage. There's just a point that many get to once you're out of your "live free" years where they realize that the person you're with is the right one and you really want to commit to them properly, rather than on an informal basis.

I don't imagine profits would have been much of an indicator for the EIC's size. The huge revenues were siphoned off by individual EIC agents. So the company had fairly poor margins, despite a huge size.

I'd also point out you're linking to a time in the 1770s, when the EIC had just taken over Bengal and a bit around Madras. They were far, far bigger later, when they had the entire continent under their control.

Oh, I accept the EIC would have been smaller when the VOC was at its peak, but by the mid-19th century, the EIC far surpassed anything the VOC ever achieved. The Siberia example is a poor one - it means nothing because the place is depopulated. India, on the other hand, had a population of a quarter of the world's. Their largest source of revenue was actually taxation rather than trade, contrary to the myth.

Yes, I know. It's not particularly correct then, but it's especially inappropriate when discussing ethnicities, that was my point.

I quite like the term, as there's not a good singular for "British" otherwise. I think it's fine to refer to people's nationality, so in the ethnicity-nationality phrasing (e.g. African-American) it works well.

I've never heard "black British".

It's on pretty much every "tick your ethnicity" form.

Intermarriage is (surely obviously?) higher because of religion, not race. How many Islamic Sudanese marry Brits?

Yes, I agree that religion is the driving factor behind reduced integration of some groups. It's amazing to me that just 5% of Pakistani Britons marry people of non-Pakistani descent. Yet some 50% of their men marry Pakistani girls from Pakistan itself.

That's the most well known case of the East India Company's evil, but in terms of human harm, what they did in India must have been worse. They taxed Indian peasant farmers at rates of 90%, despite the fact these people were living on the edge of survival. They also passed laws so that they were the monopsony buyer of agricultural output, and could thus set the price they wanted to buy at. The price they chose was actually less than the cost of production for many crops, meaning the Bengal peasantry usually got into huge debt with the Company, having to pay exorbitant interest rates too. It's very sad that Bengal was the richest country in the world when the EIC took over, and yet its successor state - Bangladesh - is one of the poorest in the world today.

Of course, the EIC managed to protect all this by bribing MPs. About 40 or so MPs were considered to be completely in their pocket, and that's excluding the "nabobs". These were men that made fortunes in India and could then go and buy estates in England and seats in parliament. This was thus clearly an early example of the corporate take-over of government that we see in the USA today, and is getting worse as the John Roberts Supreme Court strips away restrictions on finance bit by bit.

One of the elements that isn't commonly appreciated about this, is that the EIC exploitation of India didn't bring benefit to Britain. They managed to get parliament to pass monopoly control for selling Indian agricultural output too, so consumers in Britain had to pay more than they should have had to. Government finance also became beholden to the company: despite huge revenues off the EIC's operations, the company went bankrupt several times, and the UK government had to bail them out repeatedly. They would also regularly pick fights with neighbouring Indian states, and once war began, would require the regular British army to come in to support them. After conquest, they would usually support Indian allies so that many of them personally got rewarded in positions that meant they could claim huge bribes.

One of the brave men that did speak out about the abuse was Edmund Burke, the father of progressive conservatism. He was an early critic of colonialism, corporate control of politics and authoritarian government in general. Unfortunately his plan to restrict the EIC was denied by George III, the same King that pushed for a hard line on the rebellious American colonies.

I'm actually British. I'd point out that we use different stylings for different groups. So we say "black British", yet "British Asians". I wonder where it comes from originally, although I'd note that intermarriage rates - a pretty good signal of integration - are far, far higher for blacks than Asians in the UK.

As for historical integration, I agree that historic white immigrants have been absorbed more clearly - the strength of Jewish identity in the UK vs USA is a good signal of this. But this is largely because immigration to the UK has been a lot lower than immigration to the USA has been. Russian Jews, which was probably the biggest wave pre-1948, was only about 150,000 over a decade or so.

As for "Britons", the media uses it all the time. "Britons win big at the Oscars" is a frequent headline.

I always think this shows how America is better at integrating people. For me a "British Pakistani" sounds a lot more Pakistani than a "Pakistani Briton". The Thai-Chinese community sound like its a variety of Chinese rather than a variety of the Thai people.

Rape and murder were also pretty common things for most of human history. I like to think how we lived as cavemen only goes so far in making these points. If polygamy makes for a better society, then the case should be made on what it would mean today.

Yes, I am over 27. Have you considered that I was once the younger generation, and thought the exact same thoughts about how "an older generation" (those fogeys in their late 20s!) were out of touch, before getting to that age and realising they had a point.

So here's a question for you: what evidence would you need to change your mind and believe marriage was good for mental well-being and personal economics? If the answer is "nothing" then you're not being objective.

I'm not sure that society really tells us that marriage is so wonderful. It certainly tells us that weddings are fantastic, but I think most depictions of married life after about the difficulties and struggles of it. That's understandable, because unhappiness and difficulty makes for much better storylines than happiness does. In addition, sensationalist media likes to run outrage stories about people getting screwed over in divorce, and women's rights activists like to push the "I don't need no man" mentality.

If you look at the raw statistics, married people show much higher psychological well-being as well as income level, and their children are less likely to get involved with crime and drugs, and do better academically.